My Response To A “Bush Is Great” Email

I’m still believing that Bush is giving us the best response of the recent and present presidential choices in this matter, and feel he’s done more to thwart attacks on the USA and promote some semblance of stability in the mideast than any of his opponents would have done.

Unfortunately, David, what Bush has tried to do, or what he has “intended” to do, has nothing to do with the reality he has created. I happen to believe that he’s fundamentally a “good” person in that I believe he thinks he’s doing the right thing. So I don’t think he’s evil or hateful or anything like that.

But that doesn’t matter. The fact is that the world hates this country intensely because of his actions, and this fact has put is in far more danger than we’ve ever been before. See, the thing you and other conservatives are not realizing is that terrorists need something in order to operate: they need the world to agree with them, or at least a large part of it.

If terrorism lacks support, it dies. And I’m not talking about finacial support — I mean popular support. What Bush has done is create a massive upsurge in support for terrorism across the entire planet. Nobody likes us anymore directly as a result of him. Not even our allies have any sympathy for us. At this point we could be bombed on our own soil again and the world would basically agree that we deserved it.

That’s what you’re not seeing. It’s not about being militarily tough on terrorists. That doesn’t work if you’re creating hate at the same time. You have to act in a way that makes the entire world sympathize with you, thus removing the power from the terrorists. If you are “tough” on terror, but go around making the entire world hate you then you’ve done the country a huge disservice.

Here’s a mathematical way of looking at it: imagine you have two elements — protection and animosity. For every point of protection we lower our risk by 1 point, and for every point of animosity against us we gain 10 points of risk.

So if you’re trying to lower risk (which is what he’s trying to do), you can’t launch a campaign that raises our protection by 15 points while simultaneously raising the animosity against us by 100. If you do the math you’ll see what this does to our country’s actual danger level, and pointing to how much protection that 15 points got us is utterly meaningless.

This is precisely the world we’re living in now. We’re being told that the military gains we’ve made are winning the “war on terror”, when in fact we’ve done nothing but make it more acceptable to attack us due to our behavior. I ask you to consider this and rethink your opinion.